Foul Felt

NRO ^ | June 03, 2005 | William F. Buckley Jr.

[neverdem]

	E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version

June 03, 2005,

1:16 p.m.

Foul Felt

Now he wants some money for it.

Mark Felt has made it clear that he wants to cash in on this whole Watergate business, and why indeed not? It was thought for some thirty years that Deep Throat did as he did to preserve the honor of his country. Perhaps that was the precipitating motive of Mark Felt. But to agree on that point requires that you agree that getting Richard Nixon out of the White House was the supreme national concern, in which event it would have been okay to shoot him. What Mark Felt loosed was a series of explosive newspaper stories which bound public opinion and overwhelmed policy-making and policy-makers. It is indisputable that Watergate doomed South Vietnam, and accounted for the Republican defeats of 1974 and 1976. It can certainly be argued that Mr. Nixon dug his own grave by making the mistakes he made.

Presidents do that all the time. They make fateful mistakes. But the judicial arbiters of history tend to come up with appropriate punishments. Monica Lewinsky came close to tossing President Bill Clinton out of office. Yet it does not follow that because the president dallied with Ms. Lewinsky he should have been impeached and tossed out. Nixon's overreaction to the publication of the Pentagon Papers didn't mean that his mandate to govern was for that reason forfeited.

No, what ejected Nixon was the accumulation of crossed stories. It is well documented that beginning about November 1973 life at the White House centered on Watergate. The series of lies and evasions and misrepresentations finally caught Nixon up in a direct lie taped by his own machinery. On June 28, 1974, Gerald Ford was on Firing Line and I asked him directly whether President Nixon would successfully persevere. He answered that there was no doubt about the survival of Richard Nixon as President. Six weeks later, Ford was sworn in as president.

Now Mr. Felt steps forward and says that it was he who in effect staged the end of the Nixon Administration. What he did, over a period of months, was to report to two industrious journalists at the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, everything that came to his attention through the fish-eye lens. Mr. Felt wanted to know everything about the traffic of dollars to and from the Committee to Reelect the President, and everything about the background and the activities of everyone associated with the White House, from the Attorney General down to the plumbers.

As evidence accumulated of wrongdoing and crime, he reported not to the director of the FBI (his immediate superior), not to the Justice Department, but to the two journalists. Bob Woodward is thoughtful enough to have recorded, the day after the news about Fell broke, his first meeting with Deep Throat back in 1970, two years before the Watergate break-in. There they both were, waiting, in the West Wing of the White House, Woodward to deliver a message from the Chief of Naval Operations, the Assistant Director of the FBI on a mission of his own. "I could tell he was watching the situation very carefully. There was nothing overbearing in his attentiveness, but his eyes were darting about in a kind of gentlemanly surveillance. After several minutes I introduced myself. 'Lieutenant Bob Woodward,' I said, carefully appending a deferential 'sir.'

"'Mark Felt,' he said.”

Mark Antony, meeting Brutus, deserved no greater headline in history.

Such things happen. On January 5, 1973, Howard Hunt, an old friend and my sometime boss in the CIA, came to see me, accompanied by one of his daughters (my goddaughter, as it happened). He told me the appalling, inside story of Watergate, including the riveting news that one of the plumbers was ready and disposed to kill Jack Anderson, the journalist-commentator, if word came down to proceed to that lurid extreme.

I took what I thought appropriate measures. I do not believe Jack Anderson's life was actually imperiled, but meanwhile, in an adjacent theater, Mark Felt, posing as an incorruptible agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was advancing his own drama. And now he wants some money for it.

	http://www.nationalreview.com/buckley/wfb200506031316.asp

[muawiyah]

Good to see National Review catching up with me.

Yes, Watergate doomed Viet Nam. However, it also doomed Cambodia where the Commies held a bloodbath that murdered nearly 2,000,000 innocent men, women and children.

It also doomed another 500,000 Vietnamese who were pushed into the sea and drowned.

Felt is wholly responsible for this.

[Old Sarge]

Yet it does not follow that because the president dallied with Ms. Lewinsky he should have been impeached and tossed out.

I stopped reading at this point.

William the Impeached was judged for perjury and obstruction of justice. It was not about sex. Leftist tripe that does not deserve more.

[Clara Lou]

I think that Felt's family is using him for money-- playing this for all that it's worth [to them]. I have no respect for what Felt did, but he's only come forward because of his family's pushing. (JMO)

[Ann Archy]

Pitiful writing.

[fso301]

And how many embellishments did Woodward make to the story?

[xJones]

Does anyone know if the 91 year-old Mark Felt is still mentally competent? From some stories he has severe mental dementia, and from other stories he can be lucid.

The reason I'm interested is that at age 91, any book and movie rights won't really help him, so is he competent, and who's behind this this sudden revelation that seems so....opportunistic?

[-=Wing_0_Walker=-]

FELT is garbage. He should have gone to a Grand Jury IF he had any proof or information. He betrayed a trust with respect to divulging confidential info - it was not his info, data etc

[Dog]

What is going on now.....with the Felt family and Woodward fighting over dueling book deals... is coming across as unseemly to the general public.

They will not put up with this "he was a hero" being put out by the MSM.

[laconic]

Amazing consequences from the actions of an embittered loser, aren't they? Everything I've read is that Felt's sole concern about his sneakthief conduct was was how he would be perceived by the other FBI agents for violating his oath; I wonder if Felt ever spent one second thinking about what his perfidy led to -- the mass murder of millions in SE Asia, the election of that clown Carter, the wasting of South Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of boat people, political instability that led the former Soviet Union to do things like invade Afghanistan, the weakening of the presidency. And the most bizarre thing about this is the thought, spread by Ted Koppel, Brokaw and other sycophants, that Felt did this with patriotic motives to save the country from a crime wave in the White House WHEN FELT HIMSELF HAD AUTHORIZED AND ORCHESTRATED FAR WORSE BLACK BAG JOBS, ILLEGAL WIRETAPS, AND FELONIOUS BREAKINS THAN NIXON EVER DID!

[Michael.SF.]

I stopped reading at this point.

You shoulkd read the whole thing and not misjudge based just on that.

[Old Sarge]

I'm deployed. I don't have the bandwidth to waste.

[Bahbah]

I'm deployed.

We are thinking about you, Old Sarge, and your men. I do respectfully suggest that the remainder of the article is not a waste of bandwidth. Buckley's concern is for the office of the presidency, not the bent one, who isn't fit to shine Buckley's shoes. All the best to you. Stay safe.

[Rummyfan]

Yet it does not follow that because the president dallied with Ms. Lewinsky he should have been impeached and tossed out.

I think Buckley's point is that it was not the affair with Lewinsky that Clinton was impeached over, but the perjury, suborning of perjury, and obstruction of justice. Those things were all done in the attempt to cover up the Lewinsky relationship. Just as with Nixon, it was the cover-up that did him in. If he had come clean immediately, hsitory would have been a lot different. As for the lionizing of Felt as a hero, ugh!

Good luck on your deployment!

[Mind-numbed Robot]

...so is he competent, and who's behind this this sudden revelation that seems so....opportunistic?

I think it is the Democrats. A demented old man is easy to manipulate, his family obviously wants money, which can easily be provided, and some other events are beginning to converge. Bringing Watergate and a disgraced Nixon back to the front page, lionizing investigative reporters and the media, and breathing energy into a dormant "Impeach Bush" movement all seem to be converging too conveniently to me.

Not only can this be drug out into the 2008 election season but it distracts the press from the Democrats despicable behavior in the Senate.

The left knows they are in a do or die time frame and they are going to take as many with them if they go as they can. This is a fight to the death with the left and we had better fight as viciously as they do.

[hogwild]

"As evidence accumulated of wrongdoing and crime, he reported not to the director of the FBI (his immediate superior), not to the Justice Department, but to the two journalists."

Hoover knew amd was complicit about Nixon's criminal acts. How could Felts have confided with him regarding his knowledge of such. He did the right thing.

[kinejoshua]

You have to be kidding. Nixon and his fellow conspirators committed crimes, and are criminals. Felt exposed them, and I don't see what's wrong with lawfully pursuing justice. Any results of the scandal are entirely Nixon's responsibility; Felt's not the one who directed burglary and obstructed justice.

A president never has the right to abuse the power granted to him by the people of the United States. If it was so important for Nixon to remain in office to deal with Viet Nam and Cambodia, perhaps he shouldn't have displayed complete contempt for democracy and inexcusably broken the law. If any American is responsible for those 2,500,00 deaths you mention, it is Nixon.

[spanalot]

"Nixon and his fellow conspirators committed crimes, and are criminals."

Details please on the crimes Nixon committed.

[Big Horn]

Felt is a number two guy in a number two business.
He will always be known as a betrayer.

[spanalot]

"Hoover knew amd was complicit about Nixon's criminal acts. How could Felts have confided with him regarding his knowledge of such. He did the right thing."

Nixon had NO involvement in any wrongdoing when Felt started squealing. The alleged coverup was months later.

One theory has it that Dean did the break in w/o White House knowledge because of potential blackmail re: his girlfriend "Mo", the striking blond fave at the hearings